The Last Page (46 page)

“What do you mean, what? Obviously you knew. What now? Interrogate me, find answers about my uncle you couldn’t find anywhere else?” He took a step away.

Sena’s face felt like it was burning. “What are you talking about? You think you’re the only one who can open your uncle’s book? You know what your problem is? You think everyone is out to get Caliph Howl and you think you have everyone under your thumb. No one crosses Caliph Howl,” she mocked, “or he crawls away to get even.”

It was the half-truth that made it sting. But Caliph saw beneath her anger. He could read the desperation behind her attack, recognized it in the way her eyes almost trembled at the very tops of her cheekbones.

He raised his hand and looked away, speaking in slow distinct syllables. “You. Do. Not. Love me.”

“I don’t love you? Where in Felldin’s Grace did that come from?” She picked up the
C
srym T
and stuffed it in her pack. “I’ve never heard the words come out of your mouth.” She stood up, preparing to leave.

“And why should they have come out of my mouth?” Caliph shouted with a voice of indescribable fury. “You want me to admit what a fool I am?”

The sound so surprised her that she almost sat down.

Caliph’s unfettered anger, while shocking, teased her sense of play.

“I am sitting in my past talking about ghosts while my country is at war!” he roared. He turned and kicked the door so fiercely the antique hinges at the bottom gave way. It sagged inward with a groan, threatening to fall on him.

Caliph jumped back in surprise.

Though partly appalled by his temper, the mysterious tantrum caused an emotion to flicker through Sena’s stomach that, while she could not name it, made her smile. Maybe it was because she had tried so many times at school to make him angry on purpose, to see how he would behave, and this was a kind of belated conquest.

When she finally spoke, her voice had attenuated. She used a quieter, more sincere tone than she had ever used with him before.

“I’m not the one who brought us up here to wallow in the past.”

His black eyes whirled around and locked on hers.

“I didn’t come to Stonehold to use you like a stick for the fire either,” she continued. “No. I don’t love you, but if it makes you feel any better this is the closest thing to love that I’ve ever had.”

“Wonderful. Terrific . . .” His voice trailed off.

Outside, the warhorse gnashed its teeth and snapped half a dozen tails at flies, oblivious to the difficulties its riders were having. Caliph cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean to yell.”

Sena’s lips curled with sly humor.

“In two years I never saw you get that excited—I mean not like that.”

He ignored her and gestured to the
C
srym T
now hidden in her pack.

“Why did you want to show it to me? You can’t open it?” In her anger she had given her secret away.

“I said—” she began.

“You said, ‘You think you’re the only one who can open your uncle’s book?’ So what? What kind of book is it?”

Sena bit back on the argumentative words that instantly came to mind and replied guardedly, “No one really knows—except maybe your uncle and he’s out back talking with tree roots.”

When it came to his uncle’s book, Caliph averted his thoughts as much as possible. It had popped out of Sena’s pack like a horrible toy, but that was in the past now. It was just a book. Nothing more. He felt foolish for having gotten so angry over it.

He took Sena back to the castle and introduced her to the staff. He made it clear she was to be extended the same entitlements he himself received. Although he stopped short of formally labeling or defining their relationship, the staff had experience in this sort of thing. They didn’t ask maladroit or indelicate questions.

Instead, Gadriel enlisted a squadron of tailors. They descended on her with compliments and measuring tapes and imaginations vivid with her enviable body italicized in cloth. Armed with cropping blades, they threw themselves into piles of luxurious fabric, bolting out lavish styles that swelled ten wardrobes nearly overnight.

Caliph stood in awe as the castle adjusted like a calculating machine.

Several astute personages in uniform took frenzied notes on little pads of paper as they pried information out of Sena. What were her favorite authors? Colors? Musical tastes? And so on.

Did she like fur, leather, diamonds, gold or silver? Did she color her hair? Did she eat meat? Did she bathe in the morning or at night or both or several times a day?

Feminine articles materialized from inscrutable locations. Perfumes and mirrors danced in glittering array. Bouquets and extra toilet tissue unfolded in the water closet on the fourth floor. Huge men hauled additional furnishings out of every direction. Chiffoniers and towel racks and folding screens. Soaps and creams and porcelain fixtures with floral designs.

It happened at remarkable speed, like a theater crew changing props until Caliph felt certain the whole event must have somehow been anticipated, prepared for and orchestrated on cue.

He could tell that Sena was dumbfounded. She looked at him with a sudden vague comprehension of the myriad resources at his command.

For a moment the old question nagged him, bothersome but easily dismissed. Why she was with him was a riddle he probably didn’t want solved anyway. But then, pondering his own unarticulated feelings for her was only slightly less daunting.

Not so long ago, he had thought up all kinds of elaborate lachrymose metaphors to describe their relationship. But the truth was simple. She was his bag of qaam-dihet. And he was like any of the old men in ruinous plaster dens along the sea, fingers clenched protectively over the instruments of addiction, choosing to ignore the inevitable.

With Sena, he thought, it was as if someone had created her to bait him. As though his every impulse had been known to her builder. He comforted himself with the mean-spirited detail that even though his heart ached, even though he had stumbled through the Highlands of Tue in search of her, one fact remained.

She had come to him.

Regardless of motive, that single truth assuaged his ego.

Later in the afternoon, Caliph left her in Gadriel’s care and followed another of the castle stewards toward an unscheduled but urgent meeting with Mr. Vhortghast.

The spymaster had arrived from the field with intelligence and he met Caliph on the zeppelin deck of the castle’s vast east side. A gray lion, fully outfitted for war, menaced the platform, tethered to a sixteen-story mooring mast and anchored to the coupling in the middle of the deck.

Mr. Vhortghast waited at a metal railing, looking out at the gray snarled sky over Ironside while men in black uniforms scurried in the background. Caliph joined him.

A flock of birds took flight with a mournful chyrme, twisting in a helix like gnats over Temple Hill.

“Fifteenth of Dusk, P
sh. A zeppelin goes down in Nifol. Probably bandits. They miss a set of sensitive schematics. Blueprints. Manuals on solvitriol power etcetera. Pandragor technically owns them but recovery teams find them missing from the wreckage. Do you know anything about it?”

Startled by the question given almost without preamble, Caliph pawed nervously at his chin.

“By your tone I take it something’s happened?”

Vhortghast shrugged. “Not yet. I’ve got some men on it. We know emissaries from Pandragor showed up in Skellum, if you can believe that . . . at parliament. I don’t like the thought of the Pandragonians cutting deals with Shr
dnae Witches.”

“Why are you asking if I know anything about it?”

“I don’t know,” said Vhortghast. His lips seemed afraid of the hideous gray teeth beneath them, peeling back and exposing them to view. His pasty, fictile expression was unreadable. “I’m sure you have other employees that give you information.”